Cruz win in Wisconsin leaves Trump a damaged front-runner

MILWAUKEE — Republican Donald Trump emerged from the Wisconsin primaries as a damaged front-runner following a crushing primary loss to rival Ted Cruz, deepening questions about the billionaire businessman’s presidential qualifications and pushing the Republican Party toward a rare contested convention nomination fight.

Democrat Bernie Sanders also scored a sweeping victory Tuesday, giving him fresh incentive to keep challenging Hillary Clinton. But Sanders still lags behind Clinton in the all-important delegate count.

Both parties now turn their sights toward New York, which offers a massive delegate prize in its April 19 contests. It marks a homecoming of sorts for several candidates, with Trump, Clinton and Sanders all boasting roots in the state.

In the Republican primary system, candidates vie in each state to win delegates, who then vote for the nominee at party conventions over the summer. If no candidate wins an outright majority in the first vote of the convention, most delegates are free to change their allegiance, so candidates would have to compete to win their support.

Cruz has stepped forward as the candidate best positioned to block Trump in the Republican race, though it would likely take a convention battle to accomplish that goal.

A Texas senator with a complicated relationship with Republican leaders, Cruz cast his Wisconsin victory as a “turning point” in the race and urged the party to rally around his candidacy.

Even if Cruz’s gains do force the Republican race into a contested convention in July, it is unclear whether he would emerge as the nominee, or whether the party would try to put forward someone else.

In the Republican race, Cruz was poised to collect most of Wisconsin’s 42 Republican delegates.

In the Democratic race, Sanders still trails Clinton in the pledged delegate count and has so far been unable to persuade superdelegates — the party officials who can back any candidate — to drop their allegiance to the former secretary of state and back his campaign.

At a raucous rally in Wyoming, Sanders cast his victory as a sign of mounting momentum for his campaign.

“With our victory tonight in Wisconsin, , of the last caucuses and primaries,” he declared. Sanders is favored to win Wyoming’s Democratic caucuses on Saturday, but it offers a small delegate prize.

Because Democrats award delegates proportionally, Sanders’ victory in Wisconsin did not cut significantly into Clinton’s lead in the pledged delegate count.

Sanders’ win will net him at least 47 delegates and Clinton will gain at least 36.

That means Sanders must still win an unlikely 67 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates in order to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The state-by-state nominating contests are choosing delegates who will select the presidential nominees at the parties’ national conventions in July.

Bouncing back?

Trump and Clinton looked Wednesday to bounce back from their losses in Wisconsin, setting their sights on the next White House contests on friendlier ground — their home state of New York.

 

Usually at no loss for words, the real estate mogul left it to his campaign to blame his poor showing in Wisconsin on an anti-Trump movement that it said spent “countless millions on false advertising” to stop him.

“Ted Cruz is worse than a puppet — he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempt to steal the nomination from Mr Trump,” his campaign said in a statement.

Cruz took the race with 48.3 percent of the vote, to 35 percent for Trump. Ohio Governor John Kasich finished at 14 percent.

“Tonight is a turning point. It is a rallying cry,” Cruz told cheering supporters in Milwaukee after he received a hug from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, one of several former 2016 presidential candidates to have endorsed him. “We have a choice, a real choice,” he said.

Trump’s loss followed a brutal week on the campaign trail, in which he alienated women by saying those who have abortions should be punished — and then retracting the statement.

He also drew fire for comments calling NATO obsolete, encouraging Japan and South Korea to develop nuclear weapons, and a plan to make Mexico pay for a border wall by holding hostage the money its citizens send home from the US.

But Trump remains the undisputed Republican frontrunner with 743 delegates to 510 for Cruz and 145 for Kasich after Tuesday night, according to a CNN estimate. The first to get to 1,237 wins the nomination.

Trump needs to win those delegates before the Republican convention in Cleveland in July. Otherwise, he faces a fight in the second or third round of balloting when pledged delegates are free to choose a candidate for themselves.

“It’s not impossible for Trump to still get there, but the likelihood is that Trump will be a few dozen delegates short of a majority,” said veteran election analyst Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.

Clinton also emerged from Wisconsin with her formidable delegate lead intact — 1,778 to 1,097 for Sanders. To win the Democratic nomination, 2,383 delegates are needed.

And the White House race now turns to friendlier territory for both Trump and Clinton — New York and Pennsylvania, the next states on the primary calendar.

Polls give Trump more than a 30-point lead over Kasich and Cruz in his home state of New York, which votes April 19. In Pennsylvania, which votes a week later, he leads by about 13 percentage points, according to a Real Clear Politics poll average.

Clinton, a former senator from New York, has more than a 10-point lead over Sanders in both her adopted home state and Pennsylvania.

The candidates were losing no time, with Trump holding a rally in Bethpage, on Long Island, later in the day while Cruz was scheduled to make a campaign appearance with supporters at a restaurant in the Bronx.

Clinton pounces on Sanders

Clinton, meanwhile, pounced on an interview Sanders gave to the New York Daily News editorial board in which he vowed to break up big banks like JPMorgan Chase but was unable to explain how he would do it or what the consequences might be.

“I think he hadn’t done his homework and he had been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn’t studied or understood and that does raise a lot of questions,” Clinton said.

Sanders, who has won six of the last seven primaries, has won an enthusiastic following among young voters and in states with white working class populations that have been hard hit by the loss of manufacturing jobs and the 2008 financial crisis.

But it was unclear how his anti-Wall Street, anti-corporate message will fare in New York, a more diverse state whose economy is anchored by the financial industry.

“If you’re saying that we’re going to break up the banks, will it have a negative consequence on some people? I suspect that it will. Will it have a positive impact on the economy in general? Yes, I think it will,” Sanders said in the Daily News interview.